Eurovision Song Contest stage with blue lighting and audience waving national flags

Eurovision

1956eventclassic

Published August 19, 2026

Eurovision is an annual song competition run by the European Broadcasting Union where member countries submit original songs and vote for each other's entries to crown a winner. Launched in 1956, it pulls hundreds of millions of viewers each year and carries a long reputation for bloc voting and deliberately broad pop.

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Overview

Eurovision is an annual televised song competition organized by the European Broadcasting Union, where member countries each send one original song and viewers plus national juries vote to pick a winner1. It is one of the longest-running shows on television and pulls in hundreds of millions of international viewers every May3.

The format itself has grown into the meme. Countries lean into camp staging, key changes, pyrotechnics, and English-language power ballads engineered to please the widest possible audience, which is why winners are so often accused of being bland pop by design3. The other half of the fun is the scoreboard, where predictable neighbor-to-neighbor voting has fed decades of 'douze points' jokes and bloc-voting memes3.

Origin & Background

Platform
Television (European Broadcasting Union)
Creator
Marcel Bezençon / European Broadcasting Union
Date
1956

The contest was conceived in January 1955 by members of the European Broadcasting Union looking for a 'light television programme' to unite the continent after the Second World War, with Marcel Bezençon of Swiss television chairing the effort3. The first Eurovision Song Contest aired from Lugano, Switzerland in 1956, with fourteen songs from seven countries and Switzerland's Lys Assia taking the win with 'Refrain'1.

After that debut edition, the rules tightened so each country could only submit a single song per year, and the roster steadily grew to roughly 40 to 45 competing countries, eventually stretching outside Europe to include Australia as a full participant5.

How It Spread

Eurovision became a launchpad for a small but famous list of acts, most notably ABBA, who won for Sweden in 1974 with 'Waterloo', and Celine Dion, who won for Switzerland in 1988 with 'Ne partez pas sans moi'3. Most winners fade quickly, which is part of why the outliers get so much attention.

The show also produced the memes that keep it culturally loud outside its own fanbase. Finnish metal band Lordi won in 2006 in full monster costumes with 'Hard Rock Hallelujah', and in 2018 Israel's Netta won with 'TOY', a track built around chicken-cluck beatboxing that drew heavy online backlash and debate2. Longtime UK commentator Terry Wogan stepped down in 2008, publicly blaming national prejudices for skewing the vote, which pushed the EBU to introduce national juries worth 50 percent of each country's score3.

Online, Eurovision has a permanent second life. The r/eurovision subreddit hosts an active fan community4, the official Eurovision Song Contest Facebook page has racked up over a million likes6, and live broadcasts regularly land between 100 and 600 million viewers worldwide3.

How to Use This Meme

Beyond watching, Eurovision is used online as a shorthand for anything gloriously over-the-top: fans live-tweet the semi-finals with running jokes about key changes, wind machines, and 'douze points', build bracket predictions and bloc-voting maps, and share reaction clips of the more chaotic staging moments like Lordi's monsters or Netta's chickens2. Common convention on Eurovision Twitter and the subreddit is to pick a 'personal winner' separate from the actual scoreboard and defend it during the results show4.

Frequently Asked Questions